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An Interview with Actor and Poet, Amber Tamblyn

Research the poet undertook while writing her collection:
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Amber Tamblyn’s late twenties kicked her mind’s ass. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon: the slightly delayed quarter-life crisis, known to star-worshippers as the Saturn Return, is the period in which one’s life feels like it’s either thrown into total chaos or hitting the skids. Tamblyn, who muscled through the wilds of child acting and came out the other end an accomplished, sardonic, down-to-earth performer and writer, suddenly began to question everything about herself.

Before she began to experience the Fear, Tamblyn had been confident and assured, having already achieved so much by her mid-twenties. The thirty-one-year-old Emmy- and Golden Globe–nominated actress is perhaps best known for having played a teenager who talks to God in the CBS TV series Joan of Arcadia, and for her character, Tibby Tomko-Rollins, in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movies. She has also appeared in the popular hair-raising films The Ring, The Grudge 2, 127 Hours, and the beloved television shows The Unusuals, House, and most recently the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, where she played Charlie Harper’s long-lost lesbian daughter, Jenny.

Yet Tamblyn, who grew up among bohemians (her unofficial godfathers are Neil Young and the late Dennis Hopper), says poetry was her first love, and one of the few areas in her life over which she had full control. It was that agency, perhaps, that pulled her back from the existential brink a couple of years ago. The result was Tamblyn’s third collection of poems, Dark Sparkler. It examines the lives and untimely deaths of young actresses such as Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Sharon Tate, and Brittany Murphy, and features artwork by David Lynch, Marilyn Manson, and Tamblyn’s father, veteran actor Russ Tamblyn (West Side Story, Twin Peaks). She has published two other acclaimed books of poems, 2005’s Free Stallion and 2009’s Bang Ditto, as well as two chapbooks, Of the Dawn and Plenty of Ships, which she made as a teenager. The topic of Dark Sparkler is one that’s not unfamiliar to the Los Angeles native, who began her own professional acting career at age eleven. Tamblyn says the collection is the death of her twenties on paper—“the death of somebody who didn’t believe in herself, who didn’t think her poetry was good enough, who didn’t think she was good enough to direct a film.”

I spoke to Tamblyn, who is very much alive and well, by phone from Los Angeles, where she was on the set of her directorial debut, a film adaptation of Janet Fitch’s novel Paint It Black. She snuck away with her lunch to a quiet hiding spot on the huge, haunted-house property. As she stared out at a skyline of the city, we chatted about the late Brittany Murphy, the appeal of “ultimate silence,” and the importance of shedding one’s skin. —Rachel Matlow

THE BELIEVER:Dark Sparkler is your first thematic collection of poems. Why did you want to take on the subject of dead young actresses?

AMBER TAMBLYN: It started around the time Brittany Murphy died. I don’t know why, but I became very interested in her death. As someone who was born and raised in Los Angeles, I was really interested in this idea of people who move here to get into the business, and some of them do become famous and then oftentimes they fall out of that fame in very terrible ways. So I was obsessed not only with how she died and the mystery surrounding it, but also with humanizing her and knowing who she was as a person outside of that limelight. The first poem [in the book], I wrote for her. And then two poet friends of mine, Rachel McKibbens and Mindy Nettifee, were really the women who said, “This book is sort of a destiny for you and you need to write it,” which was ultimately writing the stories about the mortalities of actresses, not just their mortalities but also who they were outside of being actresses, and what it’s like for anybody to struggle with anything.

BLVR: The poem you wrote about Brittany Murphy begins with “In the shower/ her body dies like a spider’s.” You’ve talked about how you “privately glamorized” her death. Can you expand on that?

AT: I can tell you anything about Brittany Murphy. I’ve read her autopsy report and death certificate. I know that she died in the shower. That was the first visual image I had. I read that she had lost a lot of weight, and I so had this image of what a spider looks like when it dies. Sort of legs-closed like a crumpled, dead flower.

BLVR: What struck you most about Murphy’s end? It seems like you were fascinated by how her body was objectified even in death.

AT: The deaths here are stories in and of themselves. Certainly for Brittany Murphy, who, beyond her fame and failures, was a person who was not taken care of, both by herself and by people around her. That is the part that’s most interesting to me. I remember how, after she died, InTouch magazine put her on the cover in this beautiful sequined dress, immortalizing her as opposed to actually talking about what was really going on and what was happening in her life. And, culturally, that’s something I see all the time. She died so brutally. Still, to this day, we don’t know exactly what happened. But there was the sense of “Oh, let’s just remember her for how beautiful she was. Let’s forget all the terrible, terrible things we wrote about her, about her body, dragging her self-
esteem down into the ditches. Let’s forget all of that stuff. Let’s pretend this magazine never published that, and let’s just remember her for this glowing moment.” I feel that poem was trying to shed light on all of that.

Keep reading

Actress Amber Tamblyn (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,Normal Adolescent Behavior) wrote a book of poems based on the lives of actresses who died too young. She channels their complexity, life, darkness, glory and psyche. 

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